Thank you all for raising these concerns and questions and sorry for the delay in providing more context on this issue. This is a materials compatibility issue between the Form 3 tank and these resins. How much we can go into specifics is somewhat sensitive.
Rigid, Elastic, and Grey Pro Resins are incompatible with the current Form 3 Resin Tanks, causing them to leak prior to reaching a desirable lifespan. What one considers a ‘desirable lifespan’ is of course something you can go back and forth on, but leaking as a failure mode is not tolerable and many of you would reach this threshold during typical printing. These factors combined led to our decision.
We became aware of this issue prior to launching the Form 3 during validation and put all our efforts into characterizing and understanding what was going on. Our engineering team got to work on adapting our tank design to mitigate this issue and early results were promising. Internally, we were under the impression we were on a path towards a viable solution when we announced an October release date, as provided in the material availability support table. The intention was to roll out these changes to our tanks, releasing print settings in tandem. While these new tanks showed some improvement, it was not a perfect fix. Through further validation and discussion, we ultimately deemed it unacceptable for release on the Form 3.
We understand that Rigid, Elastic, and Grey Pro are popular materials and important to many of your workflows. We are sincerely sorry for the disruption that this has caused and are continuously working toward a resolution. Tank changes require significant validation, and we have seen promising early results do not always sustain through rigorous print testing. As such, we are unable to commit to a timeline for when we will have a solution. We will provide updates as we progress.
The settings delivery table may have given the impression this was about getting backed up on settings validation which, has kept us busy, but is not the blocker here. I also want to assure you our lack of commitment to a resolution date should not indicate we are not committed to reaching a solution. We continue to work hard on this materials challenge.
We also think it’s important this community understands the primary failure mode is leaking tanks. We do not recommend pouring these materials into tanks or getting creative in an attempt to print with these materials if you have some on hand.